Backstrom: He Who Kills the Dragon (Vintage Crime/Black Lizard Original)

by Leif Gw Persson

  “Well, that was it, really,” Bäckström said.

  His audience didn’t seem to share that view. There was a barrage of questions, and when the press secretary eventually restored some order, he invited the reporter from the largest television channel to speak.

  “What did you do then?” she shouted, holding her microphone up even though Bäckström was sitting five meters away and had a microphone of his own attached to his lapel.

  “What could I do?” Bäckström said. “One of them had a pistol and was trying to shoot me. The other one had a knife and was trying to stab me. So I was just trying to save my life.”

  “So what did you do?” the national broadcaster’s reporter yelled, not prepared to be overlooked a second time.

  “I did as I’ve been trained,” Bäckström said. “I disarmed the one with the pistol and rendered him harmless. The other one was trying to stab me, so I shot him in the leg. Below the knee,” he added for some reason.

  “Hassan Talib,” the reporter from Expressen panted. “One of the most feared heavies in the country, and a renowned assassin. He tried to shoot you and you say you disarmed him and rendered him harmless. According to information from the Karolinska Hospital, Talib has a fractured skull and is in intensive care, still in a critical condition.”

  “First I removed his weapon, seeing as he was trying to shoot me, then I brought him down with a judo move I learned when I was a boy. Unfortunately he hit his head on a table, and I’m very sorry about that.”

  “You disarmed him and brought him down—”

  “I think he has to take some of the blame for this,” Bäckström interrupted. “What do you think I should have done? Give him a kiss and a big hug?”

  No one in the room seemed to think so. There was cheering and applause and Bäckström was praised to the skies, and it could doubtless have carried on through the night if he hadn’t put a stop to it himself after just ten minutes.

  “Now, if you’ll excuse me,” Bäckström said, standing up. “I’ve got a job to do. Among other things, I’ve got a double murder to sort out.”

  “One more question,” pleaded the female reporter from TV3, and because she was better known for her blond hair and big breasts than her journalistic accomplishments, Bäckström had given her a half-Sipowicz and a benevolent nod.

  “Why do you think they were trying to kill you?” she asked.

  “Maybe they were more afraid of me that some of my colleagues,” Bäckström said with a shrug. Then he pulled off his microphone and walked out. When he passed his colleague Toivonen on the way out, he did so in a way that couldn’t escape anyone.

  What’s good for Bäckström is good for the police, and that’s good for me, the county police chief thought, switching off the television. For the time being, she thought.

  76.

  An unusually quiet hero who, unlike both Andy Sipowicz and Harry Callahan, belonged in the real world. In the absence of Bäckström himself, other people had to talk about him. The Aftonbladet newspaper had a large interview with his shooting instructor, which was practically lyrical.

  “The best pupil I ever had … one of the best shots in the police … ever … absolutely phenomenal … particularly under pressure … Absolutely ice-cold …”

  Several of his fellow officers had spoken out, and the fact that most of them chose to do so anonymously was simply because Bäckström had always been “a highly controversial figure in the eyes of police management.”

  There was complete unanimity and every comment was enthusiastic.

  “A legendary murder detective.”

  “He’s always right.”

  “He always sticks up for his fellow officers.”

  “Completely fearless, never backs down, never stands aside.”

  “Heads straight for his targets like a train.”

  And so on, and so on.

  Two of his fellow officers had appeared under their own names. First, his old friend and colleague, Detective Inspector Rogersson, himself a “legendary murder detective,” who contented himself with saying that “Bäckström is a hell of a guy.” And second, one of his former bosses, Lars Martin Johansson, now retired, and the man who fired him from National Crime.

  “What do I think about Evert Bäckström?” Johansson said.

  “Yes, what do you think about him?” DN’s reporter repeated, even though he had done his homework on Johansson and Bäckström’s shared history.

  “Evert Bäckström is an absolute disaster,” Johansson said.

  “Can I quote you on that?”

  “Absolutely,” Johansson said. “As long as you don’t call this number again.”

  For some reason Johansson’s comment didn’t appear in the paper.

  When the press conference was over Holt had provided a simple lunch for those most closely involved. Bäckström had been thanked with a cut-glass vase on which his name had been engraved under the emblem of the Police Authority, as well as with an old-fashioned police badge that was supposed to have belonged to Viking Örn.

  As soon as Bäckström got home he knocked on the door of his alcoholic neighbor, the former TV executive, and gave him the vase as a gift.

  “What the fuck do I want that for?” his neighbor said, glowering at Bäckström suspiciously.

  “I thought maybe you could drown yourself in it, you fucking rat,” Bäckström said. During his visit to the internal investigation team he had had the chance to listen to the recording of the call made to emergency control.

  He had spent the rest of the evening reading all the letters and e-mails he had received, even replying to some of the most promising. He opened all the parcels and presents and had a few drinks in the process.

  The best vodka in the world, Bäckström thought, holding up the little drinking glass that Nadja had put in the bag with the bottle. A lot of heart in that woman, he thought.

  77.

  On Wednesday, a fortnight after the murder of Karl Danielsson, a fair amount had happened. Bäckström had gone from “police celebrity” to “national celebrity.”

  Stockholm Police’s biggest criminal investigation since the murder of Foreign Minister Anna Lindh had been reduced to ash and ruins, and even though it was the perpetrators who were responsible for the conflagration, Toivonen wasn’t inclined to laugh. He and his colleagues were left with the task of trying to mop up the mess, and it didn’t look like an easy job.

  It was impossible to talk to Hassan Talib at all. His doctors merely shook their heads. Even if the patient survived, he wouldn’t be able to contribute much, even in the future. Extensive brain damage. Permanent damage.

  “Superintendent, you’re going to have to drop any hopes of that,” the doctor said, nodding to Toivonen.

  Farshad and Afsan Ibrahim could at least talk. The problem was that neither of them wanted to talk to the police.

  Fredrik Åkare had already been questioned. He had been good-humored, had brought his usual lawyer, but had been completely uncomprehending. He and his friends were supposed to have murdered Nasir Ibrahim? A person that Åkare had never met, would never dream of meeting? And in Copenhagen? It must be at least a year since the last time he visited the Danish capital to see old friends and acquaintances.

  “Sometimes I almost worry about you, Toivonen,” Åkare said with a smile. “You haven’t started drinking, have you?”

  Peter Niemi had submitted a new forensic report, which, in any ordinary case, would have been a breakthrough in the investigation.

  “The pistol Bäckström took off Hassan Talib matches the bullets that were pulled out of Kari Viirtanen’s skull by the pathologist,” Niemi said. “Although fuck knows what we do with that now.”

  Toivonen had made do with a loud sigh. That fucking fat little bastard, he thought.

  “What do we do?” Niemi repeated.

  “Make sure the prosecutor gets something to read,” Toivonen said. “Preferably before Bäckström holds his next press conference.�
�

  “I see what you mean,” Niemi said. “Do you want to, or shall I?” he went on.

  “What?”

  “Strangle the fat fucker with our bare hands,” Niemi said with a grin.

  78.

  Nadja Högberg hadn’t gone to the press conference, and had also declined an invitation to attend the lunch, even though Bäckström himself had asked her. She had a lot to do, since earlier that day she had discovered a storage facility run by Shurgard just half a kilometer from the Solna police station. A friendly colleague had snapped at one of the many hooks Nadja had set out. She compared the list of the company’s tenants with the list she had got from the crime section of Solna Police, and had found that one of the smaller storage spaces was leased to Flash’s Electricals.

  Nadja had set off to take a look, taking young Stigson with her. Inside the storage space were ten boxes containing the accounts of Karl Danielsson Holdings Ltd. But not a trace of Flash’s Electricals.

  In the box at the bottom of the pile she had also found a twenty-nine-year-old handwritten will, signed and witnessed on Christmas Eve 1979. It contained the following:

  At the top was one word, in the middle of the lined page, which seemed to have been torn out of an ordinary pad. Ballpoint pen.

  Will

  Then a double-line space, followed by the text itself.

  I, Karl Danielsson, being of sound mind and body, and on a day like today in a damn good mood after a decent lunch, hereby declare that it is my last will and testament that everything I own should be inherited upon my death by Ritwa Laurén and her and my firstborn son, Seppo.

  Solna, December 24, 1979.

  The will was signed by Karl Danielsson, in grandiose handwriting, and witnessed by Roly Stålhammar and Halfy Söderman.

  I suppose they were drunk. Nadja, who had an old-fashioned attitude to matters of this nature, sighed.

  Nadja and Stigson had taken the boxes and the will with them back to the police station.

  She spent the first couple hours leafing through the bookkeeping files. Mostly statements from various deals, with shares and other certificates, and thick bundles of receipts for costs incurred in the line of business, principally entertainment and travel.

  After that she had a fair idea of how Karl Danielsson Holdings Ltd. made all its money. Not because he was a genius at investment, but because someone had most likely handed him a load of black-market money, which he then whitewashed with the help of various financial transactions.

  Eight years earlier, the almost penniless company had been granted a remarkably generous loan of five million kronor from a foreign loan company. The only security given to the lender was a personal guarantee from Karl Danielsson, who by then had a taxable income of just two hundred thousand a year. Movements on the world’s stock markets had taken care of the rest. The loan had evidently been repaid within three years, and the company now had its own declared capital of just over twenty million and an actual value that was several million higher than that.

  Nadja had sighed and called the Financial Crime Unit to remind them of their promise to take over that part of the investigation as soon as she had uncovered the basics. They promised to get back to her. Right now things were a bit chaotic, but things were bound to have improved by next week.

  Nadja looked at the clock. High time to go home and prepare the meal that she usually ate on her own in front of the television.

  Instead she called Roland Stålhammar on his cell, explained who she was, and asked if she could invite him for a bite to eat. She had some questions she wanted to ask him.

  Stålhammar was unwilling to start with. He thought the police had fucked about with him and his friends quite enough by now. Living and dead friends alike, come to that.

  “I’m not thinking of fucking about with you,” Nadja said. “It’s about Karl Danielsson’s old will. Besides, I’m a good cook, you know.”

  “I’ve always had a weakness for that sort of woman,” Stålhammar said.

  Two hours later Stålhammar was ringing on the door of her flat on Vintervägen in Solna. The pies were in the oven, the beetroot soup on the stove, and the Russian soused herring already on the kitchen table together with beer, water, and the world’s finest vodka.

  Nadja herself was flushed from cooking, and Roly Stålhammar had begun by handing her a small bunch of flowers. He was also wearing a smart jacket, smelled of aftershave, and seemed completely sober.

  “You’re a damn fine cook, Nadja,” Stålhammar declared an hour later when they were sitting in the living room drinking coffee and even a small glass of Armenian cognac.

  “I’m sorry if I was rude on the phone.”

  Roly Stålhammar remembered Kalle Danielsson’s will very well.

  “There must have been half a dozen of us lads who decided to celebrate Christmas together, and Mario was in charge of the food. We all knew about Seppo, that he was his and Ritwa’s boy, I mean. The lad was only a few months old then, of course. So I suppose we started teasing Kalle and asking who was going to pay for his little lad, us or him. Things were up and down for Kalle in those days, and if I remember rightly he was completely broke that Christmas. I’m sure you know better that me what things were like when he died. He still had a few decent things that could probably be sold, but I don’t suppose the lad should expect millions. Awful business about his mother, as well.”

  “What would you say if I told you Kalle Danielsson was good for at least twenty-five million when he died?” Nadja asked.

  “I’d say you sounded just like Kalle when he’d been on the drink in the last few years,” Stålhammar said, with a wry smile and a shake of the head.

  “Kalle was an artistic soul, a bohemian,” he went on. “If he had money in his pocket, he was generous to a fault. Okay, he never seemed to want for much. Partly because he had various pensions, some of those private investments too, but he’d also calmed down a lot when he was out at Valla. Things have actually gone fairly well for us this year. We gambled together a lot of the time, as I’m sure you know. We actually had one V65 this spring that came in at almost one hundred to one.”

  “What about ten years ago?”

  “Up and down,” Stålhammar said, shrugging. “So how much did he have?” Stålhammar looked at her curiously as he turned his cognac glass between his coarse fingers.

  “Twenty-five million,” Nadja said.

  “And you’re sure about that?” Stålhammar said, having trouble concealing his surprise. “Kalle was pretty hot at accounts, you know. I remember Flash’s electricals business looked really shaky for a while, but Kalle sorted that out for him. He just had to go down to the bank and get out a fat loan, and he’d sort out the details. You make meringue from egg whites, Kalle used to say.”

  “Twenty-five million. Not meringue this time,” Nadja said.

  “Fucking hell,” Roly Stålhammar said, shaking his head.

  79.

  Alm was having trouble letting go of Seppo Laurén and the notion of patricide. He had talked to a friend in National Crime who was good with computers, and according to him there were several ways of creating a false alibi using your computer. You get someone else to sit there instead of you. If you were smart and cunning enough, that person didn’t even have to sit there in any physical sense.

  “You can connect to another computer, and sometimes it can be really difficult to trace that sort of thing,” the expert said.

  “Really?” said Alm, who was in the habit of shaking his computer when it didn’t do what he wanted.

  “Nowadays there’s even software that can do the job for you. Then you can go off and do whatever you like. The computer looks after itself, doing whatever the software tells it to.”

  “Like playing computer games for you, for instance?” Alm asked.

  “Yes, for instance.”

  Nadja wasn’t particularly impressed when Alm told her what one of the force’s “best computer nerds” had just told him.

/>   “I hear what you’re saying, Alm,” Nadja said. “But that isn’t the problem.”

  “What do you mean?” Alm said.

  “Seppo likes playing computer games,” Nadja said. “It’s pretty much the only thing he likes doing. So why would he get a piece of software to do it for him? Leaving aside the fact that he could probably put together that sort of software himself.”

  “Yes, well, there you are,” Alm said. “Listen to what you just said, Nadja.”

  “Drop Seppo,” Nadja said. “He didn’t kill Danielsson.”

  “How can you say that? How do you know that?”

  “Seppo can’t lie,” Nadja said. “People like him are incapable of it. If he killed Danielsson, he would have said when you asked him. He would have told you in exactly the same way he’s replied to every other question we’ve asked him.”

  What a complete idiot, Nadja thought, as Alm left her.

  Not only is she a computer expert, but now she’s evidently a psychiatrist as well, Alm thought, as he closed her door.

  Alm didn’t give up, and the next day he finally got his reward. On Wednesday, April 9, about a month before he was killed, Karl Danielsson was admitted to the ER at the Karolinska Hospital. At around eleven o’clock that evening one of his neighbors had found him lying unconscious by the entrance of number 1 Hasselstigen and had called an ambulance.

  Because he didn’t have any obvious external injuries, the ambulance staff thought at first that he must have suffered a heart attack or a stroke, but the doctor who examined him found other injuries when they undressed him. Someone had knocked Karl Danielsson to the ground from behind. Severe bruising to his body indicated that he had suffered a number of blows to the backs of his knees, his back, and his neck. And had suffered a mild concussion and lost consciousness.

  He had come round in the ER. The doctor had asked him whether he could remember what had happened. Karl Danielsson had replied that he must have tripped on the stairs.